I just pulled one of my grandmother’s poetry books from the shelf. There aren’t that many of them, but they are all inscribed “Midsummer Day” and were gifts from her husband on her birthday. This particular book – Poems by Thomas Hood – is dated exactly 100 years ago.
My favourite Hood poem is The Bridge of Sighs, but that’s too long to post here, so I’ll settle for one that’s appropriate to the time as well as the date:
Continue reading “midsummer night”
One of the joys of speaking two languages is that you get far more opportunities for puns than monolinguists do.
It was with delight, then – and with a language hiccough mid-way – that I saw the following on the El País website earlier today: 
The word verse flipped my mind into English and conjured the wonderful image of Obama and McChrystal having a flyting contest.
Ragged leaf veils
geometrical precision:
butterfly eggs.
In case anyone cares what sort of leaf it is, it’s a kiwi leaf, and the ones above are grape vines. And there is, indeed, something odd about the chaotic tumble of vines juxtaposed with the tiny perfect arrangement of insect eggs.
The sun slopes down into a summer evening
and hulking mountains strive to shed
the last rags of snow.
Sadly, the light has been all wrong the last few evenings to take a better picture, but the snow is still clearly visible in this one that I took one morning last week. There’ve been a lot fewer clouds for the last couple of days- it was positively hot outside at 9am today – and, although there are still a few shreds of white up on the peaks, I don’t think they’ll last many more days.
Looking at the front page of the blog, I realise that the last three posts are accompanied by pictures taken looking up at the sky, and I am reminded of a poem from my childhood.
The Rhyme of Dorothy Rose by Pauline Frances Camp starts with the line:
Dorothy Rose had a turned-up nose
That’s all I could remember of the poem, although I was clear about the story it told: rather than bemoaning her snub nose, the little girl decides to tilt her whole personality and attitude to match and becomes a delightful person because of it.
Continue reading “ever upwards”
don't confuse the narrator 